


Just Be Here

by commas_and_ampersands



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Holding Hands, M/M, Marauders' Era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-24
Updated: 2018-01-24
Packaged: 2019-02-20 05:48:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13140366
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/commas_and_ampersands/pseuds/commas_and_ampersands
Summary: Vacation with Sirius Black, Remus found, required a great deal of work.





	Just Be Here

**Author's Note:**

> Written sometime in the summer of 2007 (10 years ago, lordy I am An Old); revised December 2017/January 2018.
> 
> I just realized a lot of my dialogue-heavy stories have this tendency to take a sharp left turn about halfway through. I have no idea what that says about me.

Vacation with Sirius Black, Remus found, required a great deal of work.  Thus far, the holiday had been playing fetch with Padfoot, chasing after Sirius when he began terrorizing the locals, and practically carrying the boy out of a bar they were subsequently ordered to avoid for the remainder of their stay.  But all of that would have been bearable and even enjoyable had Sirius not possessed an unrelenting tendency to want to  _do_  things at ungodly hours.  
  
Remus couldn’t understand it.  For seven years, he had been forced to cajole, bribe, and even threaten Sirius in order to mobilize him in the morning, but the moment there were no expectations placed on him, he was a whirlwind of activity before noon.  It presented a mystery Remus might have been able to solve if he'd been able to get any bloody sleep.  
  
“Moooooony,” Sirius sang into his ear, his breath irrepressibly minty.  
  
Remus reluctantly peeked at the window, expecting to find the sun dangerously close to the horizon for the fourth time in a row.  But no, the sun was not beginning to peak over the horizon; it was entirely absent.  This distressed him, and while Remus endured many things for Sirius Black – some physically painful and others emotionally damaging – this was beyond his tolerance.  
  
“Nrgh,” he growled, pulling the covers above his head.  
  
Sirius yanked them back, ‘tsked,’ and then proceeded to carry out an alarmingly accurate imitation of Professor McGonagall.  “Remus Juniper Lupin--"  
  
“’S not Juniper,” Remus muttered, knowing it was in utter futility.  
  
“Do you really think it is a productive use of your day to lie about?” Remus could practically hear Sirius’s (McGonagall’s) disapproving shake of the head.  “I think not, Mr. Lupin.”  
  
Remus had an excellent command of the English language, and so, there were any number of things he could have said to effectively end the conversation in a witty, intelligent manner.  Surely he could compose some roundabout, entitled way of saying that remaining abed was an extremely good application of one’s day, particularly when one was on holiday.  If he could write a thirty inch treatise on the importance of the proper care and feeding of Cornish pixies, then he was quite sure that he could say or pen just about anything in a manner that would leave his audience awestruck.  
  
“Bugger off.”  
  
Just not at this hour.  
  
Sirius let out a Sigh of Extreme Exasperation and Discontent in the Face of a Very Unfun Werewolf.  “Come on, Remus.  I have things I want to do today, and we got started so late yesterday--"  
  
“Nine is late?”  
  
“On holiday it is.”  
  
“Sun isn’t even up,” Remus hissed, foolishly trying to be reasonable.  
  
“Now that, Remus Julius Lupin--”

"Not Julius either."

"--is well spotted!  I know the sun isn't up, Moony."  
  
Remus batted a hand in Sirius’s general direction in a feeble attempt at violence.  He promised himself the real beating would come mid-afternoon.  “Go ‘way.”  
  
“I will throw you out of this bed.”  
  
“And then I’ll slaughter you in a… highly unpleasant manner involving a spoon and a plunger,” Remus threatened into his pillow.  
  
“What?”  
  
“I’ll kill you,” Remus paraphrased, lifting his head just long enough to get that across before letting it fall back.  
  
“Ah, got it.  Well, that is a distinct possibility.  One that I’m willing to risk as it is far more likely that you’ll just weep like a small, disturbed child,” Sirius countered somberly.  
  
As distinctly Sirius as that comment was, the hour in which it was said still had Remus reeling.  Thoughts of Polyjuice or very expressive masks filled his head, swirling around the edges of his brain and making him naturally suspicious.  “Are you sure you’re Sirius Black?”  
  
Sirius was not amused.  “Moony--"  
  
“Because if this is James practicing psychological torture, I am within my rights to murder you.  Later.  At a decent hour.”  
  
“I am not James.  James is not smart enough to pull such a clever ruse,” Sirius insisted.  “Besides, he’s glued to the freckles on Evans's--”  
  
“Snape then,” Remus interrupted.  Preventing Sirius from zeroing in on any part of Lily's anatomy seemed like a good plan.  
  
Sirius gagged.  “God, don’t say that, Moony.  The thought of him anywhere near my hair is just too terrible to endure.”  
  
“Fine.  No Polyjuice.”  He paused.  “Not concussed?”  
  
“Rub my head.  You will find no bumps,” Sirius quipped, leaning forward as if genuinely offering.  
  
Remus quirked an eyebrow.  “Dirty, that.”  
  
Sirius huffed.  “If you are awake enough to find my  _perfectly innocent_  – really, I am surprised at you, former Prefect; your badge is likely weeping right now and rusting itself – protestations lewd, you can get out of bed.”  
  
“Before dawn,” Remus reminded him, finding that Sirius was once again overlooking this key fact.  
  
“Before dawn,” Sirius confirmed.  
  
Remus groaned as Sirius flung the covers off the bed, exposing his bare skin to the chill in the room.  His legs were technically covered, but the pajamas were so threadbare that “threadbare” was generous.  They were really nothing more than overlong handkerchiefs made to look like pants.  
  
“My badge can’t weep,” Remus murmured.  “It has no tear ducts.”  
  
“I love that you say it has no tear ducts when it also has no eyes.”  
  
“I loathe all things obvious.  Hence my contempt for you.”  
  
Sirius reached over and ruffled his hair.  “You say that now, but you won’t when you’ve seen the sunrise.”  
  
He froze, his spine going momentarily rigid.  “I’ve seen sunrises before,” Remus said, his voice just a touch too grave.  
  
He didn’t miss the almost imperceptible twitches on Sirius’s face as this registered.  Yes, they’d all seen sunrises before, at least once a month, through a haze of bone-crunching pain and soul-depleting relief.  Those mornings, Remus still wasn’t quite human, so he saw sunrises in split perspectives, before he could remember if he was a human or a monster.  Sometimes, he had to be told which he was, and he didn’t always believe what he heard.  
  
“This will be better,” Sirius promised, his voice achingly sincere.  
  
He closed his eyes.  Sure, Sirius could charm anyone else into doing his bidding, but with Remus, Sirius was most effective at his least charming.  
  
“All right,” he said quietly.  
  
The gloom vanished.  Sirius did a quick Irish jig and left a sloppy kiss on Remus’s chin – a lick with a vague impression of lips really.  Remus grunted in response to Sirius’s directions (of which the most important was ‘hurry’) and waved as he bounded out the door.  
  
Soon afterwards, Remus wandered down to the beach in paper thin jeans with holes at the knees and a thick green jumper – a present from Peter the Christmas before.  Remus didn’t remember a blasted thing about Sirius’s instructions, but Remus had no trouble finding him.  His awareness of Sirius, Peter, James, or even Lily nowadays, was a constant.  He opened the door before they knocked or turned when they tried to surprise him.  It used to vex them in school.  With the war looming, Remus wondered if maybe they weren't secretly grateful for it now.  
  
Sirius was sitting on the empty beach, feet buried in blue sand, head tilted back to look at the horizon.  Remus settled at Sirius's side with his legs folded underneath him.  Sirius gave him a look, silently admonishing him for not wiggling his toes in the sand properly, and then went back to drinking in the morning.  
  
They sat noiselessly, and Remus let it be for awhile.  Sirius wanted to enjoy the magic of nature, and Remus was willing to indulge him.  But at the same time, something about the quiet made him uneasy.  Sirius and stillness never meshed well in his head.  
  
“D’ya miss James?” Remus asked in a hushed voice, guilty over breaking the sanctity of silence.  “And Peter?”  
  
Sirius’s mouth shifted.  “Yeah,” he answered dully.  “Yeah, I wish they could be here.”  
  
The quiet roared up again, and Remus refused to let something so wrong survive.  “You know James is busy planning the wedding,” Remus continued, ducking his head to get a better look at Sirius’s eyes, shrouded as always.  “And what you said with the freckles, which I would rather not think about any more than is necessary, thanks very much.  Then Peter--"  
  
“Working,” Sirius interrupted.  “Good for him.  Finding a job right after school.”  His eyebrows moved in a way that expressly contradicted this sentiment.  
  
Remus nodded, pulling his lower lip between his teeth and stirring up skin.  “I--"  
  
“Could you just stay here for awhile?” Sirius snapped, his voice like a thousand firecrackers let loose all at once.  A pre-dawn Bonfire Night.  His eyes darted, showing off their razor-like glint.   “Don’t think about how you’d rather be in bed or how things would be better if Jamie and Pete were here or… whatever else you bloody think about.”  
  
Remus stared, not amazed at Sirius’s mood swing (he was used to those by now), but still feeling its effects.  He swallowed his words and saw that the first tantalizing hints of morning were starting to bronze their skin.  
  
And then Sirius reached out and deliberately, purposefully took his hand.  Remus felt his heart clench, because that... that wasn't right.  Sirius doled out messy affection randomly because it didn't cost him anything.  It didn't mean anything.  He didn't make a concerted effort.  Not with anyone and not with Remus in particular.

Then again, Sirius did enjoy defying his own expectations.  “I like you being here, Remus,” Sirius said.  “You’re enough.  And I… when you’re here, I want you  _here_.”  
  
Sirius had taken his hand, not punched him in the stomach.  So why did it feel like he had?  No one had ever said anything like that to him.  And he doubted Sirius said anything like that to anyone.

Remus looked at him for awhile, trying to stop the annoying fluttering of his heartbeat.  He studied the creases in Sirius's face that would one day be permanent and the storm in his eyes that had been with him since birth.  Sirius  scraped his teeth against his bottom lip, a mirror of Remus's gesture moments before.  Instead of just stirring up skin, Sirius drew blood.  
  
“Why?” Remus asked, his voice shadow – muted and dark.  
  
Sirius looked solemn.  Then he lifted his free hand and gestured in front of them, and Remus noticed the wisps of light had morphed into a blaze.  “Sunrise.”  
  
Obediently, Remus turned to look at the sun, a ball of fire rising from the ocean, defying all sense of the elements to bring the new dawn.  The sky looked as if it was ripped apart with rainbow flame, splitting apart the midnight blue with unseen hands.  Glory before him, and another kind of glory beside him.  And he didn't think he could properly appreciate either because understanding had dawned with the light, and the horror of one far outweighed the beauty of the other.  
  
Remus looked back down to their joined hands.  He adjusted the hold, interlocking their fingers and squeezing with an almost bruising grip.  Remus needed the connection; Sirius needed to know he was there.  
  
“You always were too literal,” Sirius teased, his voice rough.

His heart lodged in his throat.  "I think I get it now."

"Werewolf detective solved another mystery?" Sirius joked, but his heart clearly wasn't in it.

"You think you're going to die."  A revelation and an accusation, and Remus hated himself for not seeing it before.  "You-you've probably got something lined up for every one of us, and this is my turn, this is you saying goodbye, and... God damn it, Sirius--"

"I think the second I left home, my mother burned my name off the family portrait because I wasn't her son anymore."  Sirius sounded so certain of this that Remus almost wondered if he hadn't stuck around to make sure.  "And considering my entire family is a fucking case study in extreme reactions to anything and everything under the sun, yeah, I think they'll be out for me personally."

Remus felt his eyes burning, and he refused to cry about this.  He would not cry about Sirius blithely accepting that his own family had all but put an execution order on his head when he wouldn't fall to heel.  "That is not happening."

"Moony, I'm not saying I'm going to just let it happen, but--"

"And I'm saying they'll have to kill me to get to you."

Sirius jerked and almost ripped his hand away, but Remus held fast.  There would almost certainly be bruises between both their fingers now, and he cannot bring himself to care.  "No."  He said it as though it was an ironclad, unarguable denial.  "You can't."

"This is not a negotiation," Remus snarled.  He very rarely lost his temper.  Werewolves couldn't afford to be angry unless they wanted to be feral, wild, and fighting constantly to survive by the tooth and claw.  And he felt it far better to deploy his anger strategically, so that when he showed it, everyone knew it mattered.  "You can't tell me you see this war as a bloody death sentence, and then expect me to just let you go."

"You don't get it!" Sirius yelled.  "You don't know what they're like."

"If this is the part where you tell me that your grandfather hunted werewolves for sport, save us both the trouble."

Sirius choked.  "How-how do you know that?"

"I wasn't terrified of you finding out about what I was out of self-pity, Sirius," Remus snapped.  "I always knew what your family was.  It's all written down if you know where to look."

Sirius looked equally torn between disgusted misery and rage.  Usually, when Sirius was trapped liked this, poised on the edge of one outburst or another, Remus would wait.  Sirius almost always ran towards anger with open arms, embracing it and tearing everything else apart in his haste.

But the sunrise couldn't hold a candle to Sirius when it came to beauty, and this was one fight Remus couldn't afford to lose.

Remus grabbed the back of Sirius's head with his free hand, fingers tangling in the ink dark strands.  He pulled Sirius towards him with a predator's unrelenting speed.  He added another bruise to the injuries they'd dealt each other that day.  The curse on Sirius's lips stuttered out, and he stared wide-eyed and... not afraid, but wary, and maybe hopeful too.

“You can't stop me,” Remus said quietly.  "You wouldn't stop Jaime or Peter."

Wariness gave way to abject misery.  Sirius pressed his forehead against Remus's.  "You're different."

Remus felt his stomach flip.  He couldn't mean that.  Not the way it sounded.  Not the way Remus wanted it to sound.  He swallowed.  "I'm more durable.  If anything, they should send me out first."

Sirius shuddered.  If anything, the poor joke seemed to have made things worse.  Remus was about to take another tack, when Sirius said, "There were pelts."  Remus flinched, although the disgust felt distant.  This wasn't a revelation by any means.  With the Blacks, it felt like more of the same.  "Hanging in the study.  And I didn't... until I met you, I didn't even realize it was--"

"What did you do to them?" Remus asked.

Sirius smiled, knife sharp and gorgeous.  "Incendio, the summer after First Year.  Whole damn room went up like a tinderbox.  Who knows what other fucking horrors I burned in there."

Remus didn't ask the price he'd paid for that rebellion.  Sirius wouldn't want him to.  "I'm not going to end up on someone's wall, Sirius," he said instead.

"Read that in your tea leaves, did you?"

"I don't have to.  You wouldn't let them take me."

Sirius's eyes flashed, flint and fire and steel.  "No.  I wouldn't."

"And I won't let them have you either," Remus swore.  "I'll be there, Sirius."  
  
Sirius's shoulders slumped, and Remus knew he'd won.  For whatever that was worth.  "And after?"  
  
He couldn't lie.  But he didn't have to tell the truth either.  "I redirect you to your previous instructions to me vis-à-vis living in the moment."

Sirius barked a laugh.  "Like I'd say something that fucking cliche."

"I'm paraphrasing."

"Doesn't matter anyway," Sirius said, drawing away.

Remus made the conscious, nigh impossible effort to let him go.  His hands and arms were empty now, and it left him almost bereft.  But his voice was admirably steady when he said, "Doesn't it?"  
  
“Of course we’ll all be there,” Sirius proclaimed, puffing out his chest with pride. “We’re Gryffindors!  Terrifyingly amazing, immeasurably handsome Gryffindors!”  
  
More often than not, Gryffindors were front line canon fodder, looks and skills be damned.  But that's another thing Remus didn't have to say.  He took a deep breath and glanced around as the sun kissed the ground, turning the sand from blue to gold.  “So, what’s on the agenda this morning?  Aside from histrionic clinging.”  
  
“First, my dear Mr. Lupin, we nap.”  
  
Remus narrowed his eyes like a guillotine meeting the woodblock.  “What?” he deadpanned.  
  
“Well, I have been up since four, you know.  The hour of heathens, that’s what that is.  I’m exhausted.”  Sirius kissed him again, just as thoughtlessly as the morning, flopped back onto the sand, and proceeded to pass out immediately.  
  
Remus just looked at him, briefly contemplating murder.  “You unbelievable prat,” he muttered, glaring openly at Sirius’s unguarded face.  
  
He could leave.  Go back to their room and sleep in his bed like a normal human bei- well, werewolf.

Then again, he really couldn't.

He'd promised to be there, after all.

**Author's Note:**

> I tried to revise this with Actual, Intent Kissing, but I couldn't really make it fit. Remus is apparently anti-fraught make outs. But certainly they're dating by the vacation's end, and who knows, I may actually write that sometime.


End file.
